Android sucks 10x more personal data than Apple’s iPhone

“In ‘Google Data Collection,’ Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, catalogs how much data Google is collecting about consumers and their most personal habits across all of its products and how that data is being tied together,” Rene Ritchie writes for iMore.

“A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google,” Ritchie writes. “For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.”

“An idle Android device communicates with Google nearly 10 times more frequently as an Apple device communicates with Apple servers,” Ritchie writes. “These results highlighted the fact that Android and Chrome platforms are critical vehicles for Google’s data collection. Again, these experiments were done on stationary phones with no user interactions. If you actually use your phone the information collection increases with Google.”

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Deleting Chrome off my iPhone right now. Already deleted Google Maps last week after it was revealed it was stealing personal info when you you had the switch flipped to “please don’t steal my personal info”.

I wonder if the researchers took into account general usage patterns of the average user on each platform. iPhone users tend to have always on connections. On the other hand the vast majority of Android users are said to be less well-off so are more likely to turn off any data connections when not being used.

Oh but don’t let it bother you eh? There can’t possibly be a downside to such user exploitation can there? Can there??

Oh and while you’re at it you might as well keep your front door unlocked at home and leave your keys in your unlocked car as well. Feel free to also offer up your credit card numbers, expiration date and security code online. Nothing could possibly happen.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising developer takes advantage of how data is collected and finds some way to ‘push’ fake data that is similar in quality to hide the users’ ‘tree’ of real data in the ‘forest’ of fake. If you can’t prevent the leak to others why not make it as hard as possible to discern the ‘real’?